Video Backlog: "The Humanoid"

Publisher: U.S. Manga Corps (Central Park Media, USA)
Format: Region Free DVD, NTSC, Japanese Dialogue with optional English Dub and English Subtitles
Length: 45 minutes
Production Date: 1986
Currently in Print (as of writing): No

Story Outline: Centuries into the future, a race called the Megalosians were obliterated in a civil war. Thir emperor fled to the planet Lazeria before his death, however his daughter, Princess Ignasia, lives a peaceful life on the planet with researcher Dr Watson, his daughter Sheri and Dr Watson’s humanoid robot creation Antoinette. A routine supply mission on a ship piloted by Eric, Sheri's boyfriend, and another man called Alan goes awry and the ship ends up crashing on the planet’s surface, near the ruins of an old spacecraft called the Iczeon. However they are attacked by a small group of fighters. Both escape and meet up at Dr Watson’s house. Ruler of the planet, Governor Proud, is behind the attack on Alan and Eric and is about to relaunch the Iczeon which will have cataclysmic effects on the planet. Eric attempts to stop Governor Proud and is saved by Antoinette who is awakening to human emotions.

Mini Review: You may have read other reviews about this show or reference books and seen this show proclaimed as “a contender for the worst anime ever made” (quoted from “The Anime Encyclopaedia”). This is of course complete bullshit. Anyone who makes this stupid claim obviously has seen little in the way of truly bad anime. Try out “Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned” or “Gundress” for truly awful examples of anime. “The Humanoid” is merely mediocre. Oh sure the plot makes little sense at times, the animation is inconsistent and the colour grading is noticeably bad. Add in the Hajime Sorayama “sexy robot” design which is frankly the only reason this video was made. There are a few good points to this OVA. For example Kaname Productions (Leda - The Fantastic Adventure Of Yohko, Windaria, Birth) was the co-producer and some of the designs, especially the girls, were really good. And um, um... Ok, so that’s about it. But somehow the show managed to keep me reasonably entertained for its length.

I must make note of the extras of this disc; in particular I want to highlight the shitty “Fun Facts Video”. Random and quite nonsensical “facts”, nearly all of which are completely unrelated to the OVA pop up on the bottom of the screen over the English dubbed version of the show. For example we see a character with a moustache and then we suddenly get a list of famous people with moustaches. That list included Tom Selleck and the “Pringles guy”. In the OVA a small pink bird briefly appears on screen and suddenly a factoid appears regarding John Walter’s film “Pink Flamingos” (the bird in question in the OVA wasn’t even a fucking flamingo) and how Divine ate dog shit in that film. It was at that point I pressed stop on my DVD remote as I was not going to spend the next 45 minutes of my life watching this stupid shit. Seriously CPM, what the fuck were you thinking when someone said “hey this sounds like a great idea!” and then you wasted fuck knows how many hours creating this bullshit extra? Well, now we know how they went broke; creating shitty irrelevant extras for their DVDs, like this one.

So in the end, it's mediocre as hell, but nowhere near as horrible as people make out (and not as bad as I remembered it was when I watched it some 15 years ago). Somehow I found it more entertaining than some of the other anime I've been watching lately. 5 out of 10.

Remaining Backlog: 20 months (it's much easier this way than listing the number of discs).